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The question of whether Canada Post should switch to reduced delivery or alternate-day service depends on whether you send mail or receive mail.

“It’s an interesting dilemma,” said Deepak Chopra, president and CEO of Canada Post, during a speech to the Economic Club of Canada this week.

“The receiver of mail thinks it’s a great idea. The sender of the mail, who is in fact the paying customer, thinks it’s a bad idea.” When the option is put to Canadians in urban centres, he said, the response is very different from that of small businesses as well as those in rural and northern communities, who say, “There’s no good day to stop delivery.” But mail volumes continue to fall in this digital age, with Canada Post delivering 4 billion items in 2012, about 1 billion fewer than in 2006.

According to the Conference Board of Canada, which was hired by Canada Post to look at its options, the post office will lose $1 billion a year by 2020 unless fundamental changes take place.

Options include eliminating door-to-door service, delivering mail only two or three times a week, closing post offices, raising prices and freezing wages.

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Chopra believes it’s time to rethink how the post office does business. He pointed out that Canada Post has 6,500 outlets, more than Tim Hortons and McDonald’s Canada combined, across the country.

“Half of them don’t make any money. We have stores that don’t have more than $30 a day in revenue,” Chopra said, though he acknowledged in an interview that in some rural and remote locations the outlets serve as pickup centres rather than sales outlets.

“It won’t be a black-and-white question, if you don’t make money we’ll shut it down,” he said, noting Canada Post understands it has an obligation to serve rural and remote communities.

The idea of closing post offices will garner opposition. Chopra, who is travelling across the country to hold town halls, said he was flooded with pleas to keep the downtown post office open during a stop in Truro, N.S.

“There is so much nostalgia attached the buildings, the architecture, and the history,” he said, adding Truro councillors argued the downtown post office brings critical foot traffic to local businesses, drawing people away from outlets at big-box stores.

He wondered whether it was the post office’s job to help revitalize a downtown, especially “when consumers have voted through their wallet with the buy-one-get-one-free offer at the box stores.” But Chopra acknowledges that it is those same customers who are choosing online shopping in unprecedented numbers, and could actually help Canada Post’s bottom line.

“We can reinvent this business — and as parcels and ecommerce come into play, we can have a future,” he said, adding he doesn’t believe mail will disappear altogether because items like a passports and driver’s licences cannot be digitized.

Chopra expects Canada Post will continue with public consultations, including not without some irony, on a special website, in the coming months. By early fall, he said they will have a better sense of what might be the best options.

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